By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Saturday October 9, 2021
On Friday night at the BNP Paribas Open we saw mixed results from the participants of this year’s thrilling US Open women’s singles final, which was the first all teenager final at a Slam since 1999, as Emma Raducanu fell at the first hurdle to Aliaksandra Sasnovich of Belarus, while Leylah Fernandez, the runner-up in New York, defeated France’s Alizé Cornet.
Win or lose, there is one glaring similarity between Raducanu, 18, and Fernandez, 19. Each is focused on picking up more experience, and both operate under the assumption that there is no such thing as a straight line to the top.
There will be bumps along the way, and until both Fernandez and Raducanu have experienced more of what life is like at the WTA level – playing in different cities, under totally different and sometimes extremely difficult playing conditions, and experiencing the full week-in, week-out grind of travelling the tour as a star of the sport – they will accept that there is a lot to learn, and still plenty of room for growth.
“I'm only 19 years old,” a determined Fernandez said after dispatching Cornet, 6-2, 6-3 on Friday night to set up a third-round match with Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova. “All these players that I'm playing against have a lot more experience on tour, many more matches, many more years on tour."
Fernandez is hungry to win now, but also humble enough to understand that she's got a lot to learn.
“Like my grandfather, like my dad always says, it doesn't matter how much I know, people who are older, who have been through these situations, know more than you do, so take advantage of it, just keep in the moment, work hard and wait for your opportunity.”
Raducanu, who dropped a straight-setter to Sasnovich, 6-2, 6-4, spoke in similar terms.
“I'm still very, very new to the tour,” she told the press after Friday night's defeat. “I think that experience just comes from playing week in, week out and experiencing all these different things. I'm kind of glad that what happened today happened so I can learn and take it as a lesson. So going forward, yeah, I'll just have more experienced banked.”
The message here is clear: Raducanu has 14 WTA-level matches to her name; Fernandez has 59. Some say it takes about 150 matches on the tour to become fully acclimated to all the rigors and variables that one must encounter to be truly experienced on tour.
Clearly, Raducanu and Fernandez are set up for big-time success, and both project to have wonderful careers, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t growing pains to be endured. It’s all part of the process.
As the saying goes, it’s not a sprint, but a marathon.
By recognizing the importance of “banking” such experience, both players are already proving that they are not just wildly talented, they are also wise beyond their years. And that should help them immensely as they endeavor to fulfill the promise that they've already shown the tennis world they possess in the ensuing years.